2023-05-05

I'm adding this after the event, but this date is when I actually wrote this piece for the Education project group of the GEN Ecovillage Design Education online course. We asked everyone in the group to write about their personal experiences of education, as a background to help each other understand where we are coming from, and to give context to our ideas about what a valuable and engaging joint project would be.

I have plenty of experience of education, both formal and informal.

The formal teaching side is easiest to document. After doing a postgraduate certificate in education, in England, I was qualified to teach, and I had a couple of jobs actually teaching physics, chemistry, maths and some other things in secondary schools in England. I was also a private tutor for children wanting help with learning in these subjects. A few years later I did my PhD, and then took up a university position that involved teaching undergraduate and graduate (masters) students. After another period of research, I was in a different university role, giving what were effectively “further”, or adult education training courses in Internet skills. More recently I've helped give trainings in the Art of Hosting.

As an informal educator I've been involved at various stages with my own children, including having the great satisfaction of giving hands-on help for them all to learn how to ride a bicycle and to swim. I've helped various adults as part of their learning to drive cars.

What about my own learning? Going back, the education I received at school was very traditional. It educated my intellect, but not my emotions; in a manner of speaking, my head but not my heart. I felt that my own education failed miserably to prepare me even for university, let alone life afterwards. None of my relatives contributed anything substantial to my education. My university education felt quite disjointed and lacking in support, and it was only years later, coming back into postgraduate learning and PhD research, that I felt I was finally in my element. I've learned a great deal since then, but that's another story.

Because of my own experiences, even when I started my teacher training, I was already questioning the value of school education as it was, and still mostly is, along with its “hidden curriculum”. I read A. S. Neill (of Summerhill School fame) and John Holt (educator), who seemed to move with me from being a questioning teacher to a passionate advocate of deschooling and home education. I joined the UK organisation, “Education Otherwise”, hoping to offer my own children an alternative to the problems and difficulties of formal schooling. Sadly I wasn't able to implement that, but the vision remained with me. I was looking for a kind of child-led education that kept alive the love of learning, through learning what felt to be needed or of interest at the time, and particularly being open to whatever feels relevant to any child at any time, which differs greatly between children, and is mostly far removed from what schools teach.

As a schoolteacher, I ended up being dismayed at what a teaching job entailed. Helping children learn seemed like a minor part of the job, whereas class control, discipline, policing the social interactions, seemed to be at the forefront, and all heavily influenced by unimaginative social norms. I longed to see an education where parents, and other responsible adults, could teach, by example, a different set of norms, more suited to the world as many of us long to see it, not the mechanistic left-brain world of alienated capitalist factory work, too often soul-destroying.

I was glad to move on from schools being the norm for compulsory education, to universities where at least no one was obliged to be there. However my lecturing career coincided with the large expansion of UK higher education, and I was ultimately disappointed because undergraduate teaching felt more and more like school teaching. From what I have heard, it now has the added disadvantage that because students or their families pay fees for higher education, many students see education in a transactional way, not as a vital exciting self-directed learning experience. Like an “I pay the fees, you give me a degree, so an employer will give me a job” sort of arrangement.

This is the background to my vision for education. I have always valued an interest-led, personal research-led approach, but now we have the technology to make it so much easier and richer than 40 years ago. Even if you just want to learn academic, school subjects, there are so many online resources that make self-study perfectly feasible. The pandemic brought that home to many new people as well. For several years now we have had the idea of the “flipped classroom”, where people listen to the lessons and lectures online, maybe at home, and come together for the vital experience of sharing what they have learned with other learners; talking it over; comparing notes; exploring the richness of diversity in what different learning peers have made of the learning resources; what else they have found of interest or of use.

I was never wholehearted in my recognition of the value of teaching as a profession. Even when I was doing teacher training, the well-worn saying was going around: “those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, teach teachers”. Yes, rather disparaging, but not without a good grain of truth. I always envisaged, like in “The Peckham Experiment”, people (not only children) learning by watching people; joining in; maybe asking occasionally for advice; rather like the ancient guild system of apprenticeship. When adults doing useful or valuable things in the world becomes transparent, the doers double as guides and mentors, but it does not need to be a full-time paid profession, it's just a something you do on the side of doing what you love doing — to share what you love doing and help people appreciate and master it. That kind of approach has survived more in arts, music, and sports than in more academic subjects. But where can an adolescent see, say, a company middle manager in action? Even in sports, for sure, you can watch a football match, but there's often a huge gulf between being that kind of spectator and growing into being a professional player.

It's this kind of learning, from close, personal watching, copying, trying out under guidance, that is also the basis of much older patterns, indigenous forms, of learning and wisdom. And that should give us pause for thought. Which brings back the question of online resources. If you watch a YouTube video on, say, how to build a wall, yes you might get the general idea, but you don't have the hands-on personal contact that is so valuable to effective learning of that kind. We don't need to ignore all those useful instructional videos, but to supplement them. And I see two valuable approaches to supplementing them.

First, to build and curate learning paths. There are so many videos, so many other learning resources out there now, that a new learner really benefits from guidance, initially around where to start, and then which path to follow. For sure, you can create an online self-study course which takes an average learner through a logical path of building up their knowledge or skill gradually by stages; but how about the variety of individual learners, who want to learn in their own ways, relate to their own prior knowledge and experience? Any learning guidance resources like this need to be continuously curated, to work in new and improved learning resources, new approaches, new things that need to be learned.

Second, just as a good, engaged parent can help their children better than a stranger, because they know them better, there is room for guides, mentors, who develop a close relationship with learners; who get to know how they learn best; who know when to support and when to challenge, when to help and when to let learners work it out for themselves. I still don't see this as a full-time role. I see it as best done in a family-like situation. Of course, within a nuclear family the range of adult knowledge and skill can be quite limited. But in an intentional community such as an ecovillage, there is so much more potential for learners of any age to find the more knowledgeable and experienced people to be really helpful in their chosen learning journey.

This ecovillage scenario makes good home education possible, and more than possible, potentially much better than school education. While children remain dependent on their close family members, still the range of other more mature and experienced people are known, trusted and within easy reach, for a broad range of learning to be practical. Then, as young people grow in independence (partly thanks to that rich and broad education) they can venture outside their home village; they can go and learn, maybe like apprentices, from others in other places. That's how I see people learning, growing, developing in harmony with their natural talents and inclinations. And more than that: an ecovillage can teach, maybe implicitly and by example rather than explicitly, the values of caring for all people and the planet. And with that background of values, there is little stopping us all from learning ourselves into a rich, valuable, enjoyable, and valued life.